With Sway and Vimium I'm pretty close, haven't tried Vimium yet I'm just saying that Firefox is probably where I most use the mouse.
A mouseless tale: trying for a keyboard-driven desktop
71–80 of 111 posts
Re: A mouseless tale: trying for a keyboard-driven desktop
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same with my Sony headphones. Never understood the reasoning.
My cordless beard trimmer doesn’t run when plugged in, so you have to wait for it to charge before using it. When getting ready in the morning, you can’t sit around for an hour waiting for it to charge enough to function. It makes no sense.
I mean from an EE perspective it makes some sense, because you save some on circuitry (not like a lot in absolute cost, but your cordless beard trimmer probably doesn't have a lot of margin).
So the real reason is probably just to make it cheaper. (Well maybe not in the Mac case)
Re: A mouseless tale: trying for a keyboard-driven desktop
#73This is one of the things that pisses me off about MacOS. Every other majot OS out there at least offers a good failsafe keyboard navigation built in to each UI component. In a pinch, the keyboard is your friend, at least until your pointing device is back up. MacOS: lol, sorry, bluetooth settings require a pointing device to add a new one. Keyboard navigation? Sure. It worked up until this part, but we didn't bother…
Hilariously, I was once trying to install MacOS to a HP university laptop, hackintosh style, and got into a situation where after hours of kernel panics and boot configurations I finally got far enough to see the MacOS install screen on the display!
I did not have working trackpad or usb, but undeterred I continued with keyboard navigation through the install menu, going further and further, partitioning and formatting drives and whatnot, until finally I hit the language selection dropdown, one of the last steps in the install process. This screen, although simple, did not have keyboard accessibility. I tried everything I could but never got the mouse to work, and was stuck at the language select. Frustratingly the screen also played some weird pop music full blast which I never was able to lower the volume of.
I still think somehow they knew, that they were mocking me, knowing that the trackpad would always work on a real mac, and only kids with too much free time would be stuck on the final step of the install process...
Re: A mouseless tale: trying for a keyboard-driven desktop
#74This is one of the things that pisses me off about MacOS. Every other majot OS out there at least offers a good failsafe keyboard navigation built in to each UI component. In a pinch, the keyboard is your friend, at least until your pointing device is back up. MacOS: lol, sorry, bluetooth settings require a pointing device to add a new one. Keyboard navigation? Sure. It worked up until this part, but we didn't bother…
I had a first generation Mac mini, and I was playing around with mouse settings and accidentally changes some setting that basically disabled my mouse. The problem was the button or control to change it back didn't work via keyboard. I eventually recovered but came very close to wiping the machine.
Re: A mouseless tale: trying for a keyboard-driven desktop
#75I recently rediscovered Ratpoison WM and the origin of its name (tl;dr it is meant to prevent the need for using a mouse). I think the main issue for me really is that navigating the web is sometimes faster with a pointer. I already use vim and the shell for everything else, but navigating Google Maps or Wikipedia or Stack Overflow is just easier when you can point and scroll.
Re: A mouseless tale: trying for a keyboard-driven desktop
#76For mac https://contexts.co/ is awesome for navigating without a mouse
Vimium browser extension FTW, works on Chrome as well.
Re: A mouseless tale: trying for a keyboard-driven desktop
#77Windows used to be awesome at this. The norm (and expectation) was for programs to provide keyboard shortcuts for all sorts of things. They were gently surfaced right where you needed them - e.g. underlines on the menus, and accelerator key shortcuts listed beside menu items and in mouseover captions. That made them natural to learn and easy to adopt.
Then some dolt at Microsoft decided those cues were "clutter", and hid them by default.
A new generation of programmers grew up not knowing about, or not prioritizing, the keyboard.
I remember a junior salesguy once watched me use my computer for a few minutes and was blown away by the speed at which I did things.
Hope what's old becomes new again!
Re: A mouseless tale: trying for a keyboard-driven desktop
#78It's really humbling and everyone should do it every now and then. An old coworker coined "mouseless monday mornings" where we'd unplug our mice(?) until lunch to start each week. We all learned a lot about how to be more efficient in our IDE's, learned tons of useful OS and browser shortcuts, observed tons of accessibility flaws in our product, and all of that during the dullest hours of the week.
One is so stupid, to learn some "useful shorcuts" which are existing only until some megacorp is going to change anything in their software (OS, IDE, browser has almost none of them). I am a huge proponent of learning touchtyping, then vim and... nothing more.
wait, so, do you really move your mouse cursor all the way up to the little tiny x every time you'd like to close a tab in your browser?
Re: A mouseless tale: trying for a keyboard-driven desktop
#79Windows used to be awesome at this. The norm (and expectation) was for programs to provide keyboard shortcuts for all sorts of things. They were gently surfaced right where you needed them - e.g. underlines on the menus, and accelerator key shortcuts listed beside menu items and in mouseover captions. That made them natural to learn and easy to adopt. Then some dolt at Microsoft decided those cues were "clutter", and…
Mice were also more rare in the era in which early Windows was common. So keyboard support was often a necessity.
Re: A mouseless tale: trying for a keyboard-driven desktop
#80I'm a fan of ratpoison - https://www.nongnu.org/ratpoison/
It's a rather nice wm, or at least it was some twenty years ago when I used it between something I've forgotten and IceWM.
Should probably check it out again and compare to how I've been using i3 since 2018 or so.